MySpace.com/Doppelganger

Teenage superstar Hannah Montana would be nothing without the Internet. In fact, she is the Internet.

Whenever a teenage entertainer becomes semifamous, it's usually for a semipredictable reason. Very often, it's because the performer happens to possess an unorthodox attractiveness that only like-minded kids instantly recognize (case in point: the Olsen twins). Sometimes it's because an artist capitalizes on a marketing scheme other people ignore. (Tiffany's 1987 tour of shopping malls is probably the best example.) Occasionally it's because an act will combine a modicum of genuine talent with a craven desire to seem young, purely for commercial purposes. (This was the case with Hanson, a trio whose debut album was both not terrible and not credible.) There is always an unlimited demand for teenage idolatry; as such, there are proven, long-established techniques for constructing a temporary cult of personality around whatever ambitious, sexier-than-average sixteen-year-old the mass media happens to select. But all those conventional techniques can spawn only semifame. The sensation they produce is limited and transparent, and it's (generally) not symbolic of anything. It's what makes people use modifiers like disposable.

This, however, is not the case with that rarefied class of teenage entertainers who become authentically, dangerously metaphoric. These are people like Ricky Nelson, Brooke Shields, and Britney Spears: teenage superstars whose existence hinged on sweeping social evolutions they a) could not have possibly anticipated and b) played almost no active role in creating. In all three of those cases, the teenagers unknowingly represented something that was changing about the way American young people looked at themselves in relation to the world; they were "accidentally transformative." They remain important for reasons unconnected to their artistic purpose. Which brings us to the strange case of Hannah Montana, a sixteen-year-old entertainer who helps adolescents deal with a self-identity problem they created themselves.

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If you already know who Hannah Montana is, skip to the next paragraph. If you don't, here are the pertinent details: She is the most famous teenager in America, which makes her the third or fourth most powerful person in the universe. Hannah Montana is a highly rated TV show on the Disney network that focuses on a (nonfictional, I guess) pop star named "Hannah Montana," who secretly lives an unassuming life as California citizen "Miley Stewart." Both roles are played by Miley Cyrus, a likable, enthusiastic vessel who is a) actually named Destiny Hope Cyrus and b) the daughter of country goofosaurus Billy Ray Cyrus, who also portrays her dad on the program. Besides appearing on TV, Miley Cyrus records and tours as Hannah Montana and succeeds with Madonna-like tenacity. During concerts in 2007, she would be momentarily replaced onstage with a body double who lip-synched her songs while Cyrus changed clothes. The body double was a cloned replicant of Cyrus, built with DNA from the singer's saliva and rapidly aged through the unsanctioned, experimental process of hypermaturilization. 1 She has also toured with the Cheetah Girls.

The narrative core of most Hannah Montana episodes is established by the show's expository theme song, "The Best of Both Worlds." The hook is supposed to be an obvious paradox -- instead of working to achieve fame, Miley craves anonymity. When the show was created, I'm sure this reversal of desire was expected to serve as a novel twist on an old theme. It was supposed to operate as fantastical irony. But that is not what happened. Instead, Hannah Montana/Miley Stewart became a concept Web-obsessed teenagers could understand in a very tangible way: They all struggle to reconcile who they are with the quasi-real persona they consciously construct. Hannah Montana is the Internet.

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Like all techno-media advances, the Internet is good for the world in the short term and bad for the world in the long term. But its most meaningful impact is neutral -- it provides an opportunity for average people to create public identities that are entirely their own vision. The self-portrait you upload on Facebook 2 is what you always look like. Always. It does not matter if you've honestly enjoyed the movies you list as favorites or read the books you claim to love; by typing those titles, they constitute your aesthetic. Who is going to disagree? You want to be a stoner kite enthusiast? Type K-I-T-E E-N-T-H-U-S-I-A-S-T 4-2-0. There you go. That's who you are. You can always buy the kite and the vaporizer later.

This, I have no doubt, has been wonderful for the self-esteem of countless people who are not designed to thrive in a less pliable, more judgmental, wholly nonvirtual society. There are now two distinct worlds in which people can live simultaneously. But that also creates a new kind of problem: Because of technology, the gap between the life one inherits and the life one creates has become exponentially vast. The fake world is much, much larger. Every online existence is a noncommercial simulation of celebrity culture: Users develop a character (i.e., the best-case portrait of themselves) and then track the size of its audience (via the number of friends they acquire or page views they receive). As a result, private citizens now face a dilemma previously reserved for the authentically famous: How do they cope with the disparity between how they are seen in the communal sphere and how they live in private?

This is why Hannah Montana works. Teenagers can relate to her.

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Obviously, the idea of young people having secret lives is old. However, the idea of having a secret public life is new -- and it's a different kind of secret. It's more creative than escapist, and it requires the person to self-identify as a public figure. Over time (or at least on occasion), the online creator will desire separation from that celebrity construction and return to the simpler, unimagined existence that was always there. And this, in a nutshell, is the framework for most episodes of Hannah Montana. It also explains why that show has become accidentally important -- it premiered at a specific point in history when millions of young people arbitrarily decided they were "kind of famous." Most of them would never say that overtly, because no reasonable person ever would. But this is how they feel.

In January, the PBS series Frontline aired an episode called "Growing Up Online" that was widely criticized for fear-mongering. One of the segments focused on a New Jersey teenager named Jessica Hunter who turned herself into an online Goth sexpot called Autumn Edows. She explained how she would spend "all day" on the computer, constantly hitting the refresh button to see what new person was validating her existence. "I didn't feel like myself," she explained, "but I liked the fact that I didn't feel like myself. I felt like someone completely different. I felt like I was famous." In the context of thereport, it is suggested that her actions were dangerous because of what kind of photos the girl was posting. But that strikes me as far less troubling than the idea of a fourteen-year-old trying to feel normal while consciously generating a bipolar existence for an audience she'll never meet.

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